Dear Mr. Nowlin
All Americans, regardless of political party, are concerned about their own financial well-being and the health of the financial system they are leaving their children. In other words, their pocketbooks. As a ninth district resident, I am calling on Morgan Griffith to help protect the financial health of the country and to help ensure its continuing recovery from the financial turmoil that erupted in the Great Recession of 2007-2009.
Mr. Griffith, I want you to ask yourself before every vote: “Will voting this way truly help the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans, now and in the long-run?”
One key way to do this is to resist the retrograde goals of the Trump agenda, starting with those that would deregulate our financial system and put us perilously close to repeating the conditions that caused the Great Recession. In his response to the president’s address to the joint chambers of congress, Mr. Griffith said that he agreed with the vision the president laid out, and with the president’s goals, “to fulfill America’s potential and to help Americans in need”. These are just superficial statements – sunny, rosy, nice to hear clichés – until you dig into what they might really mean for ordinary Americans.
Mr. Griffith, I want you to ask yourself before every vote related to this agenda: “Will voting this way truly help the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans, now and in the long-run?”
One of the paths this president sees to fulfilling America’s potential is through deregulation of the financial sector. In February he signed the “Executive Order on Core Principles for Regulating the United States Financial System”. It called for huge reductions of regulations and asked for a special briefing on how to streamline financial regulations.
Presumably, a key target of the streamlining would be the relaxation or elimination of all or parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The provisions of this law were enacted after the financial crisis of 2008 to protect consumers from the predatory lending practices that had been one of the major causes of the crisis. The new Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, for seventeen years was an investment banker and CIO at Goldman Sachs, one of the Wall Street firms that emerged unscathed from the crisis, even as thousands of ordinary borrowers defaulted on their mortgages and declared bankruptcy.
Mr. Griffith, before voting to relax Dodd-Frank, please ask yourself: “Will voting this way truly help the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans, now and in the long-run?”
Within Dodd-Frank, some lawmakers are already taking aim at the Consumer Protection Services Bureau (CPSB). Weakening or eliminating the CPSB would, indeed, provide banks and other financial institutions with the ability to market more aggressively, leading to increased moneymaking opportunities. On the other side, however, consumers would become vulnerable to the deceptive practices that helped to bring on the Great Recession, while at the same time having fewer protections at their disposal.
So, Mr. Griffith, before voting to weaken or eliminate the CPSB, please ask yourself: “Will voting this way truly help the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans, now and in the long-run?”
Yours Truly,
Chandlee Offerman Salem, VA
